Representing Freetown

Photographs, maps and postcards in the urban cartography of colonial Sierra Leone

Bibliographic Data

ID9369014
AuthorsMilo Gough (0000-0001-9015-705X, University of Strathclyde, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume81
Pages3-15
Publication date2023-05-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Historical Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-7488 • E-ISSN: 1095-8614
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.jhg.2023.04.001
OpenAlexW4376597698
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

This article traces the development of the colonial cartography of Freetown, Sierra Leone across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiography of colonial cartography has centred the surveyor and the map in the capture and control of land. This article, instead, describes colonial cartography in the accretion of a variety of forms of spatial representation created by diverse intermediaries in the colonial project. The chronology begins with the cartographic anxiety of two Colonial Office circulars in 1869 and 1871. Following this emergence of a nascent cartographic governmentality, three mappings of Freetown over a forty-year period, by an itinerant West African photographer, John Parkes Decker, a Wesleyan missionary, John Thomas Frederick Halligey, and a Freetonian photographer-entrepreneur, Alphonso Lisk-Carew, are examined. Visual analysis of the photographs, maps and postcards that were the products of these respective mapping projects shows the ideologies and ambivalences that undergirded these representations of the city. At once, following the processes through which this visual material did work for the colonial state, this article shows how the cartographic governance of a segregating colonial Freetown was produced in the entanglements of geographic knowledges

Archaeology · Cartography · Colonialism · Ethnology · Geography · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sierra leone · State (computer science · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography

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